Welcome to Dish-Houston! Houston's FIRST Green online magazine all about Houston. If you are looking for something to do that is local, trying to find the perfect piece of chocolate, the right gift or even dating ideas, that's why we are here! Drop us an email! We love hearing from you! Blessings and Love!!! Dish-Houston

Entries in dish
(35)

The Holly Rose Ribbon Foundation has announced the launch of the annual Stretch for the Cause Yoga Festival at the Houstonian Hotel, Club & Spa. For it's inaugural year it is happening on Sunday, October 13, 2013 from 3-6 p.m. The HRRF is a Houston-based non-profit organization serving uninsured and under-insured men, women, and children who cannot afford reconstructive surgery after undergoing cancer treatment.

All of Houston is invited to experience The Houstonian’s beautiful outdoor meadow pavilion rain or shine while stretching for a cause, outdoor pop up boutiques will be available for shopping, raw food snacks will be on hand and refreshing fresh pressed juices and smoothies for sipping.

Holly Rose Ribbon Foundation yoga mats will be available for purchase at the event.

Sponsors for the event include:

The Houstonian Hotel, Club & Spa

Utopia Med Spa

Trellis Spa

The Jewelry Project by Elizabeth Irvine

ABOUT THE HOLLY ROSE RIBBON FOUNDATION: Formed by Houston plastic surgeon Dr. Franklin Rose and silhouette artist Cindi Rose to honor the memory of Cindi’s sister, Holly Harwood Skolkin, who battled stage 4 cancer with courage and love, The Holly Rose Ribbon Foundation 501 (c) (3) (formerly named the Rose Ribbon Foundation) has helped over 100 under and uninsured men, women and children with critical illness and cancer by providing reconstructive surgery, wigs, permanent eyebrows, education, outreach, cancer prevention, alternative treatments, and other means of support when requested, world-wide.

SCHOLARSHIP AWARD PROGRAM: The Holly Rose Ribbon Foundation scholarship award program benefiting students who have lost a parent due to breast cancer. The scholarship will be awarded to fulltime students attending The University of Houston. The first scholarship to be awarded is scheduled to happen at the end of this year 2013.

The kids went NUTS as the Houston Texans’ defensive end J. J. Watt and offensive end Ben Jones along with the American Heart Association kicked off the NFL PLAY 60 Challenge with more than 1,000 students on Tuesday, Oct. 8 at Pin Oak Middle School.

The NFL PLAY 60 Challenge is a six-week program sponsored by the American Heart Association, the Houston Texans and the National Football League (NFL). The program is designed to help schools create a healthy lifestyle for kids by helping them form habits that will last a lifetime.

The NFL PLAY 60 Challenge is a month-long contest aimed at encouraging children to exercise at least 60 minutes every day. Watt and Jones played “Texans Feud,” a game show focused on health and nutrition facts, with the children. Jones won and in an impromptu press conference with attending media after the game Watt joked saying Jones must have cheated somehow and they would figure it out later back at the stadium.

With kids spending a lot of time on video games, television and computers studies are proving they’re not getting enough physical activity. Six out of 10 children 9 to 13 years old don’t participate in any kind of organized sports or physical activity outside of school. Even more alarming, only one in four kids get 30 minutes of physical activity each day.

Today, nearly one in three children and teens in the United States are overweight or obese. This epidemic is taking its toll, as more and more kids are developing conditions and diseases typically associated with adults — including hypertension, coronary artery disease and type 2 diabetes. If this trend continues, many believe this current generation will be the first in American history to live shorter lives than their parents.

It is clear these kids had an amazing time and were absolutely inspired by these hardworking and dedicated men!

311, The Weight Loss Phenomenon absolutely works…if you use it... correctly. The good parts of this program are that there are no forbidden foods or keeping score or track of anything, in fact, it thinks for you and there is a nifty little watch to wear. I do like accessories.

The parts that don’t work for my particular lifestyle are if you don’t have time to plan meals, go to the store, cook, take meals or snacks with you because you are away from home and or office for 12 hours plus a day, at events where there are not so healthy bites being shoved in your face plus drinks at lease once a day AND that nifty little watch is very sporty which doesn’t go with Couture.

So I gave it to a friend with a different lifestyle to try it out, more on her experience in a bit.

You see, the premise here is you prepare healthy meals and a few snacks a day and you “Eat at the Beep”. It is that simple. This fuels your body, keeps your blood sugar and energy levels from dropping and thus you burn more calories. Your body doesn’t go into “storage” or “starvation” mode and because you’re feeding it healthy meals and snacks ensuring that it's always satisfied. Your body is built to crave food when it is not nourished. So you can be stuffed to the gills with McDonalds and still have the urge to eat because you body wants the vitamins and minerals provided by fruits, veggies and lean meats. If you don’t feed your body correctly (think putting diesel fuel into a gas engine) then you end up eating more and more and more of the wrong things and then obesity, diabetes and heart issues set in, among other not so amazing things.

This handy little watch takes the thinking out of fueling your body the way it was meant to be taken care of thus you lose weight. You really do! If you don’t eat donuts every time it beeps.

It comes with a pocket guide with meal suggestions, how much of which item is best to eat and a great read about what to expect during each phase of this 43 day experience. It is encouraging and most of all easy! I appreciate the scientific explanations behind why this works. You get me in the brain you cute little watch you!!

Back to my friend’s experience, she loved it! Being able to have the information handed to you, being able to prepare meals almost a week out and the little purse sized guide incase she was having a meal out was incredibly helpful. She didn’t experience physical hunger the entire program because her body kicked in and started using her fat storages as energy. After being a bit tired the first three days it was smooth sailing. She is going to continue using the nifty little sporty accessory because her life is different and absolutely worth it!

Bonus, her husband lost weight too just by the different choices she was making!

The Joy Yoga Center mascot Tiki the Dog is a very thoughtful little pup. We have posted the canine's musings here on the Health DISH before but this one was particularly thought provoking. Hope you enjoy and join us for a few Yoga classes at Joy Yoga Center soon. - DISH

Tiki, The Joy Yoga Center MascotGood morning from Tiki, your favorite Yoga-Dog! This week I had the opportunity to do a little exploring and learn about some really cool techniques for letting go of my limiting beliefs and raising my consciousness. What I'm learning has had a profound effect on a huge part of my physical experience, i.e. begging for treats!

As most of you know, I tend to spend a lot of time and energy at the studio dancing, spinning in circles, staring at you in a weird and creepy manner, whining, and whatever other tricks I can come up with to entice you to give me treats. And although this is a fun little drama to play out, it can get exhausting! Not only that, but the happiness I get from achieving the treat is fleeting - I find myself wanting another one pretty quickly.

I'm realizing that I had created an entire belief system about treats making me happy. But what happens when you are in yoga class and aren't there to give me treats, or even when (gasp!) I've run out of treats? How was I supposed to be happy then? Well, since I was exhausted from running and spinning around and using every trick in my book, I thought I might as well try this "changing my thoughts" thing!

And guess what? When I observed my thoughts, I noticed something interesting: I noticed that I have spent years perfecting ways to attain treats without ever examining why it was I wanted these treats so badly. What would happen if rather than trying to come up with bigger and better tricks to perform, if I just changed my thoughts about treats? What if I chose to believe that I don't need the treats to be happy?

Wow, what a relief this was! I felt my little Chihuahua body relax and an amazing peace wash over me as I realized that I didn't have to do or achieve anything in order to be blissfully happy! That joy and peace reside within me and are, in fact, what I am made up of.

I'm sure each of you have felt this way, too: that you have to rush around, fill your life with tasks and chores and general busy-ness in order to achieve certain goals. But when you really stop to notice your thoughts and beliefs, why is it that you feel compelled to accomplish these tasks at all? Is it because you think that in doing so, you'll arrive at a place that makes you happier or more worthy of love? And if so, is this belief system a fulfilling one? Well, probably not if you're waiting to achieve this, that, or the other thing before you feel happy and at peace.

So how about taking a lesson from this Yoga-Dog and changing your thoughts, rather than frantically running around after the treats? When we start to examine every belief we have and realize that these beliefs aren't "reality" but are merely thoughts we've created, we can begin to choose different thoughts. Rather than thinking something like "I need to have a certain job, relationship, or body type to be happy and to be loved," how about choosing a thought like "I am pure joy and pure love, just as I am!"

This is fantastically liberating! No longer do we have to rush around, trying to perfect ways to achieve the treats in our lives, we can relax and be joyful and perfectly at peace, just as we are!

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Who doesn’t remember these words from the Star Trek TV and movie franchise, a favorite show to countless millions of viewers and fans around the world? I definitely remember them, and I happily watched every single episode. Naturally, something I noticed as a health “fanatic” was the Vulcan way of living. In the show, Vulcans are classified as a highly intelligent, extra-terrestrial humanoid species, with a more robust appearance than an ordinary human. To me, it was interesting that in writing this mythos, Gene Roddenberry chose to demonstrate the direct correlation between strength and intellect in the Vulcan race; an ideal coincidentally, held in high regard by the ancient Greeks. Being fascinated with the fictional Vulcan way of living, and their healthy life philosophies, I began researching available data, in the hope of extracting singular enlightenment for the human race.

Vulcan Diet

Vulcans prefer a vegetarian diet and would eat meat on a very rare occasion, if nothing else is available or for specific needs. They choose water over other options and will drink alcohol only for celebratory purposes, because they don’t want alcohol to affect their logical faculties. To Vulcans, consuming chocolate makes them inebriated, so they minimize their intake of it.

Vulcan Meditation

Vulcans live lives of strict self-control through extensive meditation practices. While Vulcans are exceptionally emotional, they developed a meditation technique that calms them down and allows them to solve problems in a logical manner; this is one of the best ways to find logical solutions instead of emotional conflict. Vulcans meditate on a daily basis to keep their center and calm. Put simply, their motto is “live long and prosper”…

Vulcan Training

Although generally philosophical and non-violent in nature, the Vulcans nonetheless developed martial arts techniques for their hand-to-hand combat. Martial Arts are a highly ritualistic practice similar to the philosophy of Kung-Fu or Karate. The majority of Vulcans are skilled in self-defense, and particularly known for their neck pinch that renders victims instantly unconscious. Overall, Vulcans are physically stronger and more skilled in combat than their human counterparts.

In the Star Trek narrative, Vulcans have become more advanced and evolved than humans, a necessary transition implemented to overcome their past behaviors, which might have been worse than that of humans. Consequently, they evolved because they chose intellect, healthy lifestyle, and mental balance (and even honing their combat and military skills). Through this evolution, they have achieved a more fulfilled and longer lifespan; ranging between 100-200 years.

I wrote this article in an attempt to motivate millions of Star Trek fans around our own planet to live more like Vulcans. To harness the wisdom of our favorite characters like Spock and T’Pol! Even if the Vulcans are fictional people, they still represent an ideal society, one replete with enlightenment, honor and tremendous skills, all of which we desire. By following a similar philosophy, and finding an equilibrium between physical fitness, healthy nutrition, and mental balance, we can all benefit and improve our own society.

A special thanks to visionary Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek Franchise, for developing such a rich storyline and an avant-garde society.